Category Archives: Sightseeing

We left Pittsburgh a couple of days ago on our way to meet up and go to NYC with a bunch of Wally Byam Airstream Club friends from Ontario. There were several potential routes to the meetup and we hadn’t settled on where to stop the first night. Then BANG! “Why don’t we spend a day touring Niagara Falls?” Okay, small route change and no problem. Let’s do it.

Sunset on Lake Erie

Why do things work out really well sometimes? Apparently someone cancelled their plans for an RV site in Four Mile Creek State Park. This is near Niagara Falls and our site backs up to Lake Erie. Four Mile Creek State Park is a gorgeous campground with several hundred sites. The shower houses are very nicely built, although there was no walk path from our loop. The sites are large and have electricity. Water is available throughout the loops for refilling fresh water tanks and the dump station is conveniently located on our way out. Best of all, the drive between Four Mile Creek and Niagara Falls is a pretty and short twenty-mile drive.

Our NY State Park camping fee also covers the day’s parking fee while we’re visiting Niagara Falls. This happens sometimes, especially if we listen and take someone’s advice, are willing to be flexible, don’t let our expectations keep us from enjoying things, and let things work out. It’s not just a freedom of full-timing, but that helps too. Sometimes you wonder what you did wrong. Sometimes you get very lucky.

Garbed up for the boat tour

We checked in for our online-purchased tickets when we arrived at Niagara Falls State Park in the morning. The visitor’s desk lady asked us, “Do you want to get wet now or later?” Our choices were to get wet on the boat tour, or wetter on the Cave of the Winds walk. We started the day at the Falls with the Maid of the Mist boat tour.

Can you see us on the boat?

The falls almost overwhelmed us on our boat tour. Not capsized us, but it filled us completely with awe. There are 675,000 gallons per second rushing over the Canadian Falls and we were struck dumb by the tremendous power and beauty as we bobbed along in our boat near the base of these falls.

taken from the Skylon Tower

Best laid plans were thoroughly doused in our next adventure. The issued blue ponchos had kept us entirely dry on the boat tour despite wet blustery air currents and showers. We wore our waterproof hiking boots and gore-tex jackets too, so we felt well-prepared for whatever the Falls could dish out. We went next to the Cave of the Winds and boldly advised the flip-flop passer outer that we had on our waterproof shoes and wouldn’t take the free flip flops.

Ha! Our waterproof boots, once they filled with icy cold water on the boardwalk so near the falls, kept the water from leaking out from around our feet. We sloshed back to the truck where, fortunately, we had two pairs of dry socks to change into. Note for next time: use the flip flops.

Our park pass admitted us to all the attractions and also onto the trolley. We made good use of the pass, checking out all the stops on foot except for the Schoellkpof Power Station site. The trolley trip there was nice and quick and allowed us time to tour this and see the movie in the Niagara Gorge Discovery Center. Our last stop was for dinner reservations on the Canadian side, 1.6 miles distant. We walked across Rainbow Bridge, the largest hingeless arch bridge in the world from its 1941 construction until twenty-one years later when surpassed by a nearby bridge (Lewiston-Queenston) of the same design.

Perhaps exactly midway across the border we were standing astride the border between two of our favorite countries, the one where all our children and grandchildren live and the one where two of our grandchildren were born. Someone told us earlier in the day we’d find the Canadian side of Niagara Falls cleaner and neater than the American side. The remark didn’t surprise us and we weren’t surprised to find it so, again. We had a nice appetizing walk to the Skylon Tower and made our early dinner seating right on time.

dinner reservations at Skylon Tower

Debbie had arranged for a prix fixe, where everything’s included in one price, at the revolving restaurant atop the Skylon Tower. We would ride the yellow elevator up the outside and have seating in the window for a one revolution per hour dinner. The dinner was several courses, the food was very good, and the views were wonderful. This was a really nice way to spend the evening after walking all over the Niagara Falls State Park.

dining in Skylon Tower

The spontaneous stop in Niagara Falls allowed one of our best touring days ever. The weather forecast was for rain. We figured we’d be getting wet anyhow (and we did, or at least our feet did), and the rain apparently kept the park from being very busy. We arrived early and stayed until nearly 7:30 in the evening. We didn’t spend enough time on the Canadian side and didn’t quite finish the American side either.

As usually occurs, we left thinking, “We’ll want to return and see more of this”. It was a great day!

Jim’s long enjoyed making, repairing, or installing things for himself and our friends. He does his best work when he’s helping someone else. But working for himself, he says, he sometimes just tries for “good enough.” That can leave him wondering if and when he’ll go back and redo his project the way he really wants it.

We recently enjoyed a special visit with friends in York, South Carolina, near the NC-SC border. We were traveling north from Florida. John and Susan Leake invited us to park our Airstream at their house on our way up. We’ve known John and Susan several years and like them a lot. We’d heard of their beautiful home and old fashioned Southern hospitality. But this post isn’t about what great hosts they are, what a great cook Susan is, or how much we like their home. They are, she is, and we really do. Read on and see what affected us so much on this visit!

Even with the high praise we’d heard for Leake’s Antiques we weren’t really prepared for what we found. John and one of his sons, Jay, are creating gorgeous furniture masterpieces, one at a time. Their signature piece, a cellaret, is pictured below (read about it in the Garden and Gun Magazine article, linked further below:)

“John and Jay Leake hand make period reproduction furniture in the styles of William and Mary, Queen Anne, Chippendale, Hepplewhite and Sheraton. Using all solid wood, each piece is made to order using the finest mahogany, cherry, walnut and maple available. Not only is the wood of the finest quality but also our hardware and brass. Customers who identify quality and craftsmanship will especially appreciate our furniture.

John Leake and son Jay build fifteen to eighteen major pieces per year in their York, South Carolina shop, each with craftsmanship featuring hand carving, dovetailing, and pinned mortise and tenon joinery.

We don’t have a “line” of furniture. Pictured on our showroom page are some of our favorites. We often duplicate them but can also adapt or modify them for your needs, or build you a totally custom piece. We work on 1 piece at a time for 1 customer at a time. We welcome your inquiry, better still, a visit.”

Doesn’t that sound pretty special? We think so. The real thing’s even better and they’re receiving well-deserved recognition for it. A couple of years ago, Garden and Gun Magazine did a feature on John and Jay’s work. The link takes you to a wonderful article with nice photographs of the Leake’s shop, showroom, and the guys too.

Jim’s dad built furniture as a hobby. He instilled in Jim a love for woodworking and finishes. When Jim graduated from college he worked for years as a construction carpenter then ran a woodworking and cabinet shop. He did all the shop work and installations himself and learned what it takes to do good work. John and Jay don’t just do good work, they do beautiful work. Their craftsmanship is amazing.

This matters to the rest of us. Have we heard anyone complaining about how poorly things are made nowadays? Are our lives affected by cheap or inappropriate clutter? Does quality pay? Do beautiful things improve our lives? Does a job well-done improve our outlook? The answer to all five is, “YES.”

Competing priorities can confuse things. There’s only so much time and money and there are plenty of rationalizations:
“We’re leaving tomorrow and this needs to be safe and secure first;
We didn’t spend much on this because it’s just a trial and we might not like it;
I’ll do this better later when I have more time.” And you can think of some others, right?

We see there’s a new Dyson $399 handheld blow dryer on the market. Dyson reportedly stated his company has never designed “down to price.” He’s not interested in competing with companies offering lower-cost goods. He makes the best product he can and the buyers who want it will pay for it. If a buyer like his products and thinks they’re worth the price then everything’s copacetic. (ed. note: we don’t own any Dyson things :-)

Dyson’s new hair dryer

The Leakes aren’t compromising on quality either. We’ve never seen better crafted furniture than John and Jay are making. The attention to detail and the joinery is superb. Jay hand cuts the beautiful visible dovetailed joints, and even the blind structural joints are dovetailed. Their furniture has perfect joints, flawless inlay, beautiful hardware, gorgeous finishes. They’re taking their time to do their very best work on every piece they build. The result is pleasing to the eye and soul.

We thank John and Jay for showing us how high quality work matters to them and to their customers. They create beautiful furniture. As John Keats wrote 200 years ago in his poem, Endymion “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Seeing the high quality work Leake’s Antiques turns out made all the difference to us. Why settle for less?

Any other highway but I-10 would be fine this time. So we started westward on I-20 and almost magically found ourselves entering the Sacramento Mountains on US-82. How could we have known how cool this was going to be? How many times did we not take this road?

We’ve crossed the continent, out and back, almost every year for the past ten. Every time we’ve been pulling our sweet 25′ Airstream home-on-wheels behind us. It seems like we’ve taken I-10 way too many times.

Really we probably used other highways at least half of the times we traversed the continent. We’ve crossed on The TransCanada Highway once, and each of I-90, 80, 70, and 40 at least once in both directions. Interstate 10 gets all our other crossings because it’s the most southern route and therefore the most suitable for towing our unwinterized RV in January, Feb, or Mar, which we often seem to do.

We were headed from North Carolina to Casa Grande AZ for the WBCCI Airstream Club’s annual winter Board meeting. Each evening on this trip we looked at the possible routes and weather a day ahead ahead. An overnight in Sweetwater TX on I-20 gave us a good look at a route we’d never considered. We saw a straighter line than I-20/I-10 offered from Sweetwater to Las Cruces, by picking our way from I-20 to US-82. We had no idea the adventure we were facing, the route simply looked more direct.

One hundred or so miles later we were in an incomparably beautiful area, the Sacramento Mountains in Lincoln National Forest. Without a doubt this was the prettiest part of our entire drive. The two lane road gently turned and climbed back and forth as it followed an ancient route through a gorge and then inexorably upward toward Cloudcroft NM at 8,650 ft above sea level.

There were long stretches of nothing but unspoiled terrain. This natural beauty reminded us of driving on Top of the World Highway between Dawson City YT and Chicken Alaska, where for as far as we could see away from our road there was no trace of civilization anywhere. Gradually we started seeing more homesteads, then RV parks, and finally stores. In Cloudcroft we even drove by a small ski slope filled with folks enjoying skiing on a sunny afternoon.

It took a little while for us to recover from the excitement of watching our engine and transmission temperatures climb on the mile-high climb and imagine our brake temperatures climb on the 4,300′ descent. Then we realized we were going to be driving right by White Sands National Monument. Several times we had driven on one border or the other of the White Sands Missile Range. We’d never been on this side of the area and hadn’t thought how to find our way to it. We had to stop!

We spent a fascinating hour touring the Visitors Center and watching their very good video about the area. We learned some history and geology about the area, and why the white sand is special – it’s gypsum instead of quartz. What surprised us most is the rule prohibiting taking any of this white sand out of the park. Sure enough, we saw little piles of it on the sidewalk of the parking area where people dumped out their shoes so they wouldn’t be absconding with the material.

I’ve friends who won’t take that road, the one less traveled. Their travel’s going to be on the four-lanes and GPS-referred routes. There’s nothing wrong with that. Those roads are likely to have good paved shoulders, softer grades, great sight lines, and perhaps other safety features. The best thing is that the really interesting routes might remain, in Robert Frost’s words, “the road less traveled by.” It did make all the difference for us yesterday.

We’d never contributed to a Kickstarter campaign. We’d never even browsed their web site. Kickstarter claims 15 diverse categories and thousands of projects. I’d wondered what was the motivation to contribute to a campaign. Someone I know kicked in on a project a few years ago. He received a handful of the items when it went successfully to production and he gave us one. Still I wondered, why get involved in this?

Eric Bricker is a friend we first met at Alumaflamingo (Sarasota FL) several years ago. We’ve since met with him several times in other locations. He’s each time impressed us with his enthusiasm for the Wally Byam Airstream Club and all things Airstream. Clearly he’s done his homework about our Club and community. This morning we opened Eric’s invitation to look at his Kickstarter campaign for “ALUMINATION, a feature-length documentary”. We love it and we’re all in!

This film is something all Airstreamers can look forward to enjoying. Eric’s trailer will give you a pretty good understanding of his feel for our Aluminum community. I’m interested in supporting this project because of his demonstrated talent, hard work, and successful portrayal of something I believe in – the Airstream lifestyle. I hope you’ll agree his project is worth supporting, and you’ll open your wallets to kickstart it like we have.

Like this:

2015 was a good year for us. It wrapped up an enjoyable eighth year of full-timing. We began the year in a wet and chilly Corpus Christi TX, and the year mostly improved from there. Our year was full of interesting travels throughout much of the United States. We visited another FL state park (Silver Springs) for the first time before visiting Sarasota and Miami again. We added another state, Pennsylvania, to our camping list with two weeks enjoyable visits there.

We traveled a different path westward to Farmington NM for the Airstream Club’s annual meeting and rally. It was fun to stop at the mother ship of Bass Pro stores in St Louis MO. Along the way we discovered a free city park in Elk City OK (electricity and water,) and nice RVers everywhere we went. While in Farmington at the annual meeting, Jim was elected to 2nd Vice-President of the international Airstream Club. This was an exciting event and promises to provide a lot of hard and rewarding work.

Sadly, Jim’s mother died in mid-March last year. We left Miami earlier than planned to rush home to be with Catie and family during this tough time. Thankfully the campground in southwest Miami was very accommodating about refunding our unused camping nights, and we’re glad we weren’t any further away from the family home. Our full-timing lifestyle allowed us to quickly respond to the family’s needs and care for Catie so she could stay home during her last two weeks.

One of our daughters and her family repatriated from Vancouver in Canada last month. They’re getting settled in with many adjustments after being out of the country for ten years. We’re excited to have all our children and grands living in North Carolina for the first time. We sense, on the other hand, a tug to start settling on our NC mountain acreage. Doesn’t this look really inviting? We have courtesy parking – let us know if you’d like to stop in. It’s pretty nice.

Two new grandchildren joined our family last year. We’re grateful our travels and their arrivals all timed well, and they’re both in N.C.

We encountered our fair share of mechanical issues last year. Our fridge and water heater both failed on our rain-soaked trip from Farmington. Not until we hit some dry pavement in Tennessee did these start working again. Our batteries stopped charging from shore power. We accidentally destroyed our folding step when we ran it into a projecting concrete sidewalk. Precipitates from the water heater clogged our sink faucet completely. The solar charger quit. Debbie’s makeup mirror LED lights failed. We found ourselves needing to replace the trailer’s brakes and turn the drums. We had our worst water leaks into the cabin. One that soaked the fabric base of our sofa and one that dripped onto the floor from inside the roof air conditioner.

These are all pretty routine maintenance issues to us. To have a gaggle of mechanical issues in the same year is unusual for us and was frustrating at times. We sometimes defer maintenance when we think we can count on getting to it before long. Ideally, we catch problems before they catch us. Other times, a delay turns out to be punctuated by a repair instead of preventive or scheduled maintenance. Dry camping is easy when most things are working. Living in an RV is easy for us when most things are working. Our RV is eleven years old and is apparently becoming a little more demanding. Okay – we’re on it!

Our 2015 towing mileage was 11,740, down from 14,866 miles in 2014. This brings our total full-timing towing miles to just under 108,000 miles. Our truck has 157,000 total miles, so towing represents 70% of our total truck mileage. The truck and trailer each continue to delight us with low maintenance needs and costs. We still plan to run the truck to 200,000 miles, or another three to four years, before replacement. Get your bids in soon for future purchase of a lightly used truck!

Our full-timing travel costs continued another year to trend downward. We spent $2,966 on camping sites, down from $4,050 and $4,565 the prior two years. Our average cost of camp site rental for 2015 dropped to $8/night, down from $11 and $13 the prior two years. Our average nights stay per site returned to six nights.

One expected decrease is our towing miles per relocation. We averaged 178 miles per relocation in 2015, our second lowest number in eight years. Moving more often within southeast USA from July through December 2015 drove this and other reductions. This year we’re likely to spend more time traveling out west, so some of these may swing upward again.

Finally, we now freely admit we’re likely to build a house. We bought very nice land two years ago in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Weeks spent at various times of the year getting a feel for the sun, the weather, the wind, and the neighbors, provide us good ideas for site placement.

This attraction to building a house runs counter to our full-timing ethic of the past 8+ years. We promised we would only stay on the road full-time so long as we wanted. We’re still loving it, but are beginning to wonder how many more years. We think it’d be nice to eventually have a house again.

Three days in Albuquerque and we’ve hit all the destinations. Well, all the dining ones on our list, that is. We think New Mexico cuisine is a great reason to come to Albuquerque, and if you’re in Albuquerque you may want to try it too.

Five years ago we first visited Albuquerque while traveling on an Airstream guided trip, The Southwest Caravan. We love New Mexico cuisine and think Albuquerque covers it as well as anywhere. Stern’s Road Food and our caravanning friends led us to fun dining choices on our first visit. We’ve been trying those and new ones in visits since.

This week we dined at these four, in order: Duran’s Pharmacy; El Charrito; Model Pharmacy; and Frontier Restaurant. Duran’s, Model, and Frontier are recommended by Stern’s Road Food, and El Charrito is recommended by some of the staff at American RV Park. They’re all good choices, and all different.

Here’s our rundown of this week’s fun NM food dining, place by place.

Duran’s – We arrived near Old Town at 6:30PM for supper and we were one of only two tables occupied. We had very personal attention from an engaging and helpful wait person. Debbie ordered a Mexican Combination Plate and Jim ordered a bowl of green chile topped with shredded cheddar cheese, served with a very good tortilla. We finished with a slice of blueberry pie a la mode. The green chile was tasty and smoking hot, way picante, as hot as anything we ate anywhere this week. Deb’s combination plate was tasty, and the warm blueberry pie was great. The crust was tender and flaky and the filling was sweet and a nice consistency.

El Charrito – We were the only Anglos amongst a lively lunch crowd in this neighborhood restaurant on Central at 50th. Service was very friendly and fast. Jim joked to the waitress the combination plate lunch was not very big (it was really ginormous.) She laughed and said they have much bigger meals but Debbie had ordered a small one. Really? Jim’s carne adovado meal was way too much for one of us. It’s marinated pork served with lettuce, tomato, rice and beans, and a tortilla. The marinated pork was tasty, spicy-hot, and tender, and except for the spiceyness seemed like New Mexico’s answer to North Carolina’s pulled pork barbecue.

Model Pharmacy – The scale and setup of Model Pharmacy’s dining area is similar to Duran’s. Duran’s Pharmacy store is much larger and seems first a pharmacy, then also a gift store and restaurant. Model seemed equally a trendy gift store and a restaurant, neither very large. We readily found a table for dining but could easily have picked a stool at the fountain counter. Service was as good as at Duran’s, but Model was busy so the waitperson really worked to do so well. Our waitperson was attentive without interfering and made nice and helpful recommendations. We ordered a cup each of green chile stew with a tortilla, and we ordered coffee and a scoop each of Dreyers ice cream. The green chile stew was laced with carrots, celery and bits of beef, was mild and very tasty.

Frontier Restaurant – Frontier is directly across the street from University of NM. Open from 5am to 1am seven days a week and serving hot food really quickly, Frontier seems to serve a lot of people all the time. We arrived after 8pm today and had no wait to order. There is an order counter where we placed our order and received a number. Less than five minutes later our dinners were plated and on trays for our pickup. If there’d been a line we’d still have had our food within no more than ten minutes. Jim ate a cup of carne adovado with a chicken taco and a tortilla. Debbie had a half-order enchilada plate. The serving sizes were perfect for us and the food was excellent. The carne adovado was slightly spicy and, again, most like pulled pork barbecue with extra kick.

They have very large and attractive sweet rolls ($1.85) that remind us of the many rolls we enjoyed on our Alaska Caravan several years ago. While we were dining we watched a couple of dozen people show up to order. Within several minutes they all had ordered and were queueing to pick up their trays of food. Parking at Frontier can be challenging for lunch, but we easily found street-side parking on Central outside the restaurant for this late dinner.

Model had the tastiest, for us, green chile stew. Duran had the hottest green chile by far. Frontier is the low-price leader and the very fastest. El Charrito served the most food on a plate. We look forward to our next visit to Albuquerque so we can eat great NM food again.

Last year, after attending Alumapalooza, a great rally held in Jackson Center OH by R and B Events, we were on a serious quest for Apple Genius bar help on a portable drive/router we’d bought. Fortunately for us, the Apple Store in Indianapolis is easily accessible from the Interstate. Most times we get excellent assistance from the Apple store pros and we always look forward to correcting what we’ve goofed up on our devices and learning something. We fared less well that time, but whetted our appetite for a later visit to Indianapolis.

One year later we’re again heading west from Jackson Center, but this time to a very sweet little town a little north of Indianapolis, Noblesville IN. Our friends Carolyn and Mike invited us to stay with them and gave us a nice choice — park in Indianapolis or park in the countryside near Noblesville. Hmm, it’s Memorial Day weekend, the Indy 500 runs this weekend, there’ll be 1/2 million folks in and around Indianapolis. What would you do?

Nice place to stay

We parked in Carolyn’s meadow for the long holiday weekend. Good choice! It was quiet in her part of the countryside, we had lots of room, partial shade, 3amp electric, all much better than we usually bargain for. Little did we know, our hosts had even more in store for us.

Mike and Carolyn drove us into Indianapolis, gave us a nice tour, and we visited the Ansel Adams exhibit at the Eiteljorg Museum. We spent a wonderful afternoon slowly touring the exhibit, then had a bite to eat at the museum’s patio café, and returned to speed crawl the remaining exhibits. Not at all fair to Remington and CM Russell, but we just weren’t there for them this time.

We took a day off enjoying life in the country. A little hiking, some great eating, and we were ready for some aviation. Rick, Carolyn’s neighbor, showed us one of his little project UFOs. Actually, they’re UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, I guess it means. He has tremendous electronics skills and plenty of energy, and has put a little of it into building some really neat UAVs.

It does much more than just fly

Rick skillfully (he humbly admits, skill involves painful and sometimes expensive errors) piloted the six-motor battery-driven UAV up, then up some more and more. No matter how high he took it, we could still hear the carbon-fiber rotors spinning. And he was able to track where it was and also, with a GoPro camera, watch us or anything else he wanted to track.

Wow! This is so COOL!

Debbie watched the monitor briefly, fascinated by the amount of information and the video quality. It displayed both the GoPro camera live video and the UAV’s vital statistics including altitude, speed, and battery usage/life.

You’re letting him fly it?

We don’t know what Rick was thinking, but he let Jim pilot the UAV for a couple of minutes. Two joysticks moving back and forth, the UAV soared, dipped, and went left and right. Jim may never get one like Rick’s hand built from scratch model, but maybe a ready-to-fly would be fun. . .

Conner Prairie experience

The next day, having experienced all facets of country living (there’s not more to it, is there?) Mike and Carolyn drove us to Conner Prairie, an interesting living history park nearby. We spent the afternoon talking with the “actors”, enjoying how they respond to out of context questions or remarks. They are dressed for and reenacting life in 1836. When you ask one of them about any terms or concepts newer than 1836, like sanitation or sterility, they are most likely to give you a blank stare then ask, “What’s that word again?” Wonderfully done, and a great way to spend an afternoon with friends.

Image captured by spy guy

We did more, we ate more, we saw more — but without further elaboration suffice to say, we had a great visit with our fun friends and look forward to another visit sometime.